A
scrawny-looking Dane with an Auschwitz
haircut and murky smile twice mounted the stage on prize night at the
1991 Cannes Film Festival. For his third feature film, Lars Von Trier, 34, won a Prix de
Supérieur Technique (which he handed to a colleague, saying,
"He has worked on all my films and he is very technical") and a Prix du Jury.
He didn't look happy at either award. But then, like many of us, he probably
thought Europa had a
chance at the Golden Palm, and the hell with these palmettos.

Europa, stylistically the most
dazzling film seen at Cannes for years, is a trip along the twin scenic
routes of myth and history. It's about a journey of illusion that provides
lightning glimpses, from a darkling parallel track, of the reality-track
humanity so often leaves behind-especially when rebuilding the
social-political infrastructure after a world war or related conflagration.

The film is about the present
thinly disguised as the past. The "Europe 1945" setting vouchsafes
a continent in chaos searching for unity, just like Europe 1991
pre-federalization. And the film is also about the U.S.A. then and now. The
postwar world's policeman-peacekeeper, embodied in an American hero played
with goofball sweetness by Jean-Marc
Barr (Hope and
Glory, The Big Blue), isa
one-man walking Marshall Plan. His and America's function: to step into any
and every international quagmire (call us anytime) and set it to rights.

The tongue-in-cheek
all-inclusiveness of the story and setting conveys itself to the style. Europaisa film so extravagantly
playful that it seems like a fire-sale of postmodernist tropes. Strewn with narrative non sequiturs and
casual apocalypses, it is to postwar Europe what Twin Peaks isto small-town America.
Its lexicon of visual artifices-front and back projection,
color-and-monochrome mixes, surrealist sets, Wellesian
shots in which the camera threads the unthreadable
– suggests that Von Trier has
studied every breakthrough-baroque film from Citizen Kane to Blue Velvet via Vertigo,
and refused to tuck their ornate influences tidily away.

But if Europaishigh on metacinema (cinema about cinema
about cinema), it's also high on metaphysics. Its young U.S. hero, arriving
in postwar Berlin to take a railway job with his German uncle, is coming to
play his tiny part in rebuilding Europe. But he's also coming, less
wittingly, to plug the West into a culture whose doomy
romanticism, enhanced by a world-war Götterdämmerung, is as rich, rotten, and fructifying as manure.

Europa isa deliciously mischievous primer of
twilight-imperial Teutonic tones, from Wagner to Wedekind to
Kafka. Wagner inspires the
film's mock-inspirational music moments, as when the train giantized by low-angle shots is first pulled from its
shed. Wedekind is the model
for the mercurial sexuality. And Kafka
provides the nightmare matter-of-factness: the sense of a
social-historical labyrinth patrolled by insane protocols and vetting
processes.

Stylistically, the film pays
homage to between-wars Europe's greatest cinematic gift to the West: film noir. Shot like a rain-slicked Walpurgisnacht, Europa isabout
the dangerous charm of Europhilia: its tendency, noted by commentators as
diverse as Henry James, Mary McCarthy, and Paul (The Comfort of Strangers)
Schrader, to shake the innocent visitor into profundities of
self-contemplation.

In
his 1984 first feature The Element of Crime, Von Trier pushed a lumpen Anglo-Saxon detective (Michael Elphick) into a Euroworld of
shadows and catalyzing intrigue. In Europa Jean-Marc Barr is caught in a tug-of-war
between loyalties. For the Americans he's a minor, useful tool to help in
Europe's reconstruction. For the unrepentant Nazis he is something else. As
an aspiring sleeping-car conductor on Zentropa
Railway's Berlin-Frankfurt run, he is required not just to pass the literal
vocational tests (with the aid of two dotty Kafkaesque examiners) but to help
"switch points," metaphorically speaking, so that postwar Germany
can reroute itself onto a branch line of glamorous myth.

Glamour in Europa comes in the shape of Barbara Sukowa, every inch a cod Dietrich, as the beautiful Zentropa
heiress who snares Barr into
love, marriage, and political connivance. When not tending her guilt-haunted
father and his Freudian toy railway upstairs, Miss S works for the so-called
"Werewolves" – unreconstructed Nazi sympathizers who carry out
terrorist attacks and whose captured members are martyred by hanging.

Meanwhile – in the best
ripping-yarn tradition, Europa is full of meanwhiles
– the rival mythic branch line being built through mid-Forties Germany is an
Allied initiative under guidance from Colonel Eddie Constantine. Constantine, here resembling Dwight D. Eisenhower after a
cosmetic-surgery experiment with a bullfrog (it didn't work), is busy passing
out "Were you a Nazi?" questionnaires. He fakes their completion
when he needs to exonerate and recruit a U.S.-useful German tycoon, like Sukowa's own father Hartmann.

So while history pounds on
towards a yet-unguessable future, each of these
rival mythic track-layers tries to persuade Germany/Europe to go his way. To
continue honoring its brutal nationalistic past (the Werewolves). Or to
pretend that it boasts a fully reformed present (Constantine).

The film sees railways as the
perfect metaphor for that demotic monomania whereby we each try to railroad
reality into a personal or collective mythology. But as used by Von Trier, the railway motif
becomes far richer even than this. Trains are popular in movies because
they're like the moviegoing experience itself.
Inside a sheltered, unchanging capsule, four or five hundred people watch
moving pictures through rectangular screens.

This two-plane reality – the
"safe" capsule-habitat and the "dangerous," changing view
outside-is at the heart of Europa'sstylistic
strategy. One running gag involves the hero's constant pulling-up of windowshades, only for them to be yanked down again by
the movie's batty authority figures. "There is nothing to see!" his
uncle keeps snapping. Another leitmotif is Von Trier's
use of back and front projection and superimposition to vary the visual
dynamics of conversation scenes. Barr
and Sukowa, though talking to each other in the
same train compartment at the same time, take turns at being the
"filmed" image on a rear screen. The neo-Hitchcockian
joke is relished by Von Trier. "What you say seems
to come from a place far away," croons a foreground Sukowa,
in color, to a lost-looking Barr rear-projected
in black and white.

The director uses the technique
not just for dialogue but for high drama. A Werewolf boy is planted on the
train to assassinate a mayor. As the bullets he's loading accidentally fall
to the floor, a change-of-shot shows them magnified and colored in the
foreground while a monochrome projection depicts the startled passengers in
the background. The ensuing shots elaborate the visual conceit in a whirlwind
montage, adding surreal distortions of perspective: e.g., boy (color,
foreground) firing at giant, door-bursting train guards (black-and-white,
back-projected).

Even these descriptions
simplify the multiplicity of techniques in use. "Sometimes, Von Trier has pointed out,
"we have up to seven layers of images in black and white and color. We
can thus combine two or more images filmed with different lenses, such as a
background shot with a telephoto lens and a foreground shot with
wide-angle."

Von
Trier grants himself the
license to be oneiric from the movie's opening. If
hallucination is one device in the film, hypnosis is another. "At the
count of ten you will be in Europa," drones the voice of Max Von Sydow, as soothing as Dr. Mesmer, over a film of a moving railtrack. And the somnambulant Swede continues to strike up
throughout the film with phrases like "Go deeper" and "Deeper
still:' He's even there at the train-crash-and-death-by-drowning finale; when
Barr, having blown himself
out of the train's protective capsule of illusion, goes "deeper"
indeed, into the waters of release and annihilation.

The use of a narrator, albeit a
bizarre one, allows the film to be a caprice within a caprice. The tone of Europais at once deadly serious and
completely nonsensical: a New
Yorker Glen Baxter cartoon crossed with a Jorge Luis Borges story. If the hero's train
journeys are a parody-metaphor for human determinism – the hypnosis of
historical helplessness – the punctuating outside-world scenes in Hartmann's
mansion or amid the debris of war-wracked towns are cartoon-hallucinatory
cutaways.

Here, in the waiting-rooms of
history, mad powerbrokers sort out the world's next itineraries. By virtue of
his multi-layer narrative and multiplane
visuals, Von Trier can
push the film's tone in almost any direction at almost any moment. It's like
the finger-snap comedy-tragedy alternations in Pirandellós Six Characters in Search
of an Author.

The film's most sheerly brilliant switchbacking
sequence is set around Hartmann's midfilm suicide.
The sequence starts and ends with two single-shot coups de cinéma. In the first, the camera descends
from the toy-railway room, where Barr
and Sukowa are about to make love, through
the floor into the bathroom below, where the monochrome image (now revealed
as a back projection) is broken up by a colored hand-and-razor rearing up in
the foreground. In the concluding shot, color seeps into a black-and-white
shot of Barr, Sukowa, and others rushing to the locked bathroom door,
while the camera simultaneously rises to a point above the wall to watch a
sea of red blood flood out under the door.

Von Trier's strategy with color is to
sketch or splash it in at high-intensity points. (Or to highlight a key
object, like a red communication-alarm on the train.) Once this surreal
license with color has been taken, Von Trier tries even bolder style-stretchers. The back and front
projection serve not just to tweak reality into subtle distortions but to
skywrite startling artifices. In one shot Sukowa's
face, filling the screen in soft-focus monochrome, becomes a reverie-backdrop
for Barr sitting in a small
corner at screen left. And later a single word – WEREWOLF – is unscrolled giant and genielike
behind Barr as if his mind
has just been rubbed by the idée fixe to ejaculation point.

Von Trier even uses multiple-projection for narrative ellipses.
The midnight sky and river against which Barr and Sukowa stand in one scene,
gazing into each other's eyes, dissolves into the magnified face of a priest,
to whom the couple then turn to announce their marriage vows.

What's
exciting about Europaisthe sense it conveys of a
knock-on stylistic freedom. One poetic license prompts another, yet the film
never collapses into a heap of illusionist tricks. One reason is the skill
with which we are outflanked and surprised. The other is that the very
subjects of this movie are chaos and illusionism. What Von Trier is examining, in the guise of a
story about the immediate postwar West, is the chaos and illusionism of the
present-day West.

At its broadest, this relates to
a world where frontiers are in flux as never before in the 50 years since V-E
Day. At its narrowest, it comments on the pentecostal
pluralism of modern cinema itself. Europaisa coproduction with a vengeance: a
Danish-Swedish-German film with a Canadian star and Polish locations. Yet far
from providing (like most coprods) two hours of gobbledy-gook dubbed into Esperanto, the film uses its multination cast and bilingual
dialogue (German, English) as an ironic, many-colored sonic palette.

As the pre-millennial Western
world melts into political and cultural harmony (we should be so lucky), here
is a film-maker celebrating the mad determination with which human beings
stay different while swearing detente. Europa is about the Tower of Babel nervously eyeballing the
United Nations Building; and about the world's need to build a line
connecting the two. "The train now arriving at Platform 2000...."